


Shake It Off

by AdamantSteve



Category: Southland
Genre: Cops, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 16:22:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/599753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdamantSteve/pseuds/AdamantSteve
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lydia is still a rookie. She meets a young Ben Sherman on a call. She investigates and talks to Ben, feels sorry for his situation, clear that things are not as they should be in the home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shake It Off

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jae/gifts).



> Hi, so the prompt called for these characters and for it to be set pre-events-of-the-show, and this is what I came up with. I really hope the recipient likes it :/

 

 

Lydia had been a rookie cop for four months now, past the worst of the gaffes, missteps and fuck ups that a few other greenhorns were still making. Her TO was Oakes, a cheerful middle-aged man who was cheating on his wife and had a tendency to call Lydia ‘Lid’. She didn’t hate him: he was a good cop, a moral person at least in terms of the law. Well, the law as it pertained to other people and them. It was complicated. But it was fine. More and more she was learning what all cops learned in the first few months of having their shiny new badge: loyalty to your own was not just for the gangbangers. Martin Oakes was a good cop who had her back, and that was all that really mattered. 

 

The day started like any other: bitter black coffee for Lydia and some kind of flaky pastry thing for Oakes. Their first call was fairly routine and gave Lydia a chance to practice her ‘concerned but not too interested’ interviewing technique on a man who’s storefront had been vandalised. She would never quite perfect it, always wanting to know more, ask questions beyond those that garnered just the solid facts of the situation. Oakes laughed at her afterwards in the car, said her soft heart would get her in trouble one of these days, and Lydia uncomfortably looked out of the window as the drove on to the next call, uneasily thinking that it probably would.

 

The next call was to an apartment; a domestic dispute. The couple were still yelling on the stairwell when they got there, and a shot was fired somewhere close. They drew their guns and advanced up the stairs. An old woman peeked out from her door, hooking her chin over the chain. “Go back inside, ma’am,” Lydia advised. The woman ignored her. The yelling abated momentarily following the shot but then continued at a higher pitch, didn’t stop even once they’d got there to find a woman - probably intoxicated - waving a gun around and the remains of a picture frame, broken glass and all, in an equally intoxicated man’s hands. 

 

“Police!” Oakes yelled, since the couple were lost in one another’s angry eyes. The woman turned and dropped the gun behind her, startled, and it made a heavy clunk sound. The man looked at his hands and dropped the glass behind himself sheepishly before assuming a pointlessly innocent gaze. It was a mess, and the two of them were subsequently impossible to talk to. In the end, they left them with instructions to clear up the mess of broken glass and call the super about the ‘mysterious’ hole in the wall. 

 

Lydia was shaken afterwards, kept thinking about the bruises on both their arms, the glimpses of the squalid apartment she could see through the door. Oakes was as cheerful as ever, but he seemed at least slightly quieter on the drive to lunch. A few other cops were at their usual hotdog spot and giving each other shit for whatever rookie mistakes had been doing the rounds of late. Lydia politely smiled and joined in, had gotten past the point of having to force herself to make conversation and be friendly, content to just sit back and laugh. “Shake it off,” Oakes advised her when he sat down with their red plastic baskets of food, and once she’d done eating and laughing at Grassman’s story about Solis shooting himself with a beanbag gun, she had shaken things off. At least til later when she could drink a glass of wine and stow it away at home.

 

A call came in once they were back in the car finishing the dregs of their cokes for another domestic in the hills, and Oakes said something about how relationships could be shit no matter how rich you were. They pulled up to a predictably beautiful home: manicured hedges, tall gates, fountains, the whole nine yards. It was quiet, and the doorbell chimed loudly when Oakes rang it. The door swept open into the kind of home that still felt unreal to Lydia, still felt like a show home, like real people didn’t live there. A boy who couldn’t be more than ten warily watched them but didn’t say anything, holding the door so they could walk in. 

 

“Officers, this is so embarrassing. There’s just been a misunderstanding!” a man crowed, sweeping into the lobby and looking ruffled. “Honestly, we don’t want to waste anyone’s time.” 

The two cops stood and waited, til Lydia realised Oakes was waiting for her to initiate questioning. “Sir, we had a call saying there were raised voices and loud noises coming from this house. Is there anybody else in the house other than you and your son?” The man chuckled and put his hands in his pockets. The boy still stood warily next to the door but remained quiet. “My wife. She wants plastic surgery. I mean, this _is_ Hollywood,” he pulled a face and rolled his eyes, “we disagreed and she left.”

 

“Mind telling us how this disagreement manifested itself?” Oakes interjected, eyes roving around the marble-floored lobby as he said it, hands resting either side of his belt the same as Lydia’s. 

 

“My wife can be a little shrill sometimes. She threw a vase at me. It was very melodramatic.” 

 

Oakes stepped forward and asked the man - Benjamin Sherman - if he’d been drinking, to which he shrugged and said he’d had a business lunch with a couple of cocktails earlier. Out of the corner of her eye, Lydia noticed the boy, still warily on the edge of the situation, and Oakes had the man take him to the scene of the crime, as he jokingly put it.

 

“What’s your name, kid?” Lydia asked the boy, leaning on the door frame to what looked like a den. “You think we could talk a minute?” Sometimes kids like these ones, rich white children in designer clothes, had worse attitudes than the ones in the hood, but this one - Ben junior - politely ushered her into what was more of a library than a den before closing the door and looking up at her with serious eyes. “What should somebody do if they know someone’s a criminal but they know nothing will happen if they go to the police?” 

 

Lydia was blindsided. This tiny kid was already seeing that the world through jaded eyes. She didn’t have an answer. She wasn’t naive enough to believe justice truly was blind, even if it ought to be. Some people bought themselves out of justice in one way or another and as much as she wanted to - should - tell this kid otherwise, she could tell he wouldn’t take it. “Do you mean your father?” she asked.

Ben shrugged. Yes, his dad. “You should always call the cops if someone’s breaking the law.”

“And what then?” 

“And then... if they’ve committed a crime and there’s the evidence to prove it, they’ll get the punishment that a court decides they oughta have.”

He gave her a sardonic look which spoke volumes about what he thought of her copout of an answer. But what else could she say? “Is your father telling us the truth about your mom?” 

“I don’t know, I wasn’t here. But probably not. He lies a lot. He’s a lawyer.” 

 

Lydia suppressed a frown. “Does he ever hurt you or your mom?” 

“No,” 

“Did he hit her today?” He shrugged again. “Would you tell me if he had?” She asked, cocking her head to one side. He pursed his lips and thought about it for a moment before shrugging at the same time as nodding his head, a tentative yes. 

 

“You can tell me whatever you want, Ben,” Lydia said, feeling herself going off-script and being unable not to. When he didn’t say anything else she felt in her top pocket for a card which she handed him. “My number’s on there. If you ever need to talk to anyone, give me a call, ok?” He took the card reverently and quickly put it in his pocket when they could hear footsteps in the hall.

 

-

 

Back in the car, Oakes railed for a little while about Ben senior, how much of a slimeball he was, calling in to confirm his vague recollection that he’d been implicated but never formally charged with a sheaf of crimes to do with drugs. He didn’t even tell Lydia off for giving the kid her number, said he’d have done the same himself. “With an asshole like that as a father it’s amazing he said anything at all.” 

 


End file.
